


Delicate

by LFTPD



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Asexuality, Character Study, F/M, asexual leslie knope, non-graphic mentions of sex, this is not a high school AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26031541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LFTPD/pseuds/LFTPD
Summary: It feels like overnight the girls at Pawnee Junior High decided to care more about boys than anything else. Leslie finds the whole thing terribly boring.
Relationships: Leslie Knope/Ben Wyatt
Comments: 7
Kudos: 35





	Delicate

The first time Leslie feels different is in seventh grade. It’s her first year at Pawnee Junior High, and Leslie can’t wait. She’s going to join every club, run for student council, and maintain a 4.0 the entire time. She shows up on her first day with a backpack full of craft supplies to decorate her locker. A portrait of L’il Sebastian, obviously, and a postcard her Grandma sent her from Florida, and maybe one of the friendship keychains she made at summer camp last year. 

Her best friend, Lindsay Carlisle Shay, gets the locker next to hers, but when she pulls out her decoration supplies, it’s just a pile of Teen Beat magazines. Apparently, Lindsay would rather have pictures of Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron in her locker than Lisa Frank stickers. 

“That’s baby stuff,” Lindsay says, “And anyway, Patrick Swayze is dreamy.”

Leslie doesn’t think iridescent penguin stickers are for babies, and she doesn’t think Patrick Swayze is dreamy either. The girls at Pawnee Junior High don’t agree. It feels like overnight everyone decided to care more about boys than anything else, and Leslie finds the whole thing terribly boring. Who wants to talk about boys when they could talk about waffles or scrunchies or Margaret Thatcher? 

“You’re a late bloomer. Before you know it, you’ll be just as boy crazy as the rest of your friends,” Leslie’s mother tells her when she complains after another slumber party where everyone would rather talk about french kissing than play charades. 

But Leslie never feels boy crazy. When she gets a little older, she has her first crush. There’s a boy on the student council who always makes really good points in their meetings. He helps her organize the canned food drive after the raccoons take over the food bank, and he always makes her laugh. Leslie has never cared much about school dances—apart from organizing them, of course, because that’s a lot of fun—but she thinks she might ask him to the next one.

“You can’t ask out Martin!” Lindsay gasps when Leslie mentions it casually. “He’s a major dork. How can you think he’s cute?”

Leslie’s not sure if she thinks he’s cute. He doesn’t look anything like the boys on all of Lindsay’s magazines. She doesn’t really think about kissing him, or anything like that. She just thinks he’s nice, and that maybe they’d have a nice time together. Doesn’t that mean she likes him?

She goes to the Spring Fling with Martin, and they date for a few weeks. He pushes her up against the bleachers and she has her first kiss. It’s fine. It’s not nearly as gross as she’d thought it would be. After a few more tries, they learn how to stop knocking their braces together, and Leslie thinks she might almost like kissing. She likes feeling his arms curled around her. She likes the way he smiles when he pulls away. She thinks her mom was right, and she was just a late bloomer.

Her senior year, she lets a boy named Thomas go all the way. It’s uncomfortable, and messy, and Leslie really doesn’t get what the big deal is. She doesn’t come, and he doesn’t seem to have any idea of what he’s doing. She thinks the whole thing is a little overhyped; she’d rather just get herself off in the privacy of her own bedroom. But all of her friends say that it gets better, so when she goes to college she gets on the pill and buys an extra large box of condoms.

It stops hurting, but she never starts liking it. It’s still messy and sweaty. It always lasts entirely too long. She wishes she could spend more time kissing and curled up in someone’s arms and less time on the main event. Leslie wonders if everyone feels that way—there’s a reason people used to say to ‘lie back and think of England,’ right? She asks a friend about it once, when they’ve both had enough to drink to really be honest with each other.

“Maybe you’re a lesbian,” her friend says with a shrug. 

“Oh,” Leslie blinks, takes another sip of her margarita. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s 1995, Leslie,” her friend says, rolling her eyes. “Anyone can be a lesbian.”

Leslie thinks about it for a few weeks. She’s never had a crush on a girl, but she thinks girls are beautiful. She loves spending time with all of her female friends. Maybe that means something? So she goes to a party at the Queer Collective, drinks too much, and kisses a girl.

It’s fine, really. She doesn’t think she likes it any more or less than she likes kissing boys. 

After college, Leslie is too busy to worry about it. Her dating life is pretty much nonexistent. Lindsay sets her up, but she rarely makes it to a second date. She doesn’t really mind; dating would just take away from binder making and planning out her future. 

Then one day she stages a gay penguin wedding, and things start to change. April invites her to a party at the Bulge, and she has a great time. She gets free drinks, so she starts going more often. She feels a little out of place at first. She trips over her tongue a few times, says the wrong thing because she hasn’t been around gay people since that kiss in college.

“What does it all stand for?” Leslie asks one of her new friends one night, pointing over at a poster. “LGBT I know, what’s the QIA part?”

“Queer, Intersex, Asexual,” he yells over the music. It’s too loud for a real conversation, but she’s never heard that word before.

“Asexual?” she asks, and he just shrugs. When she gets home that night, she grabs her laptop, a pen, and starts a new binder.

It’s strange to have a word for it. It doesn’t really change anything, but Leslie feels different. She tells Ann one night, when they’re both sprawled out on Ann’s couch watching Golden Girls reruns.

“I’m asexual,” she says, glancing over at Ann nervously.

“Huh,” Ann says, reaching for the remote to turn down the volume. “Like, you don’t want to date anyone? Is that why you’re single?”

“No, I still want to date people,” Leslie says with a slight frown. She knew it would be hard to explain. “It’s more like… Well, you know how you look at a cute guy and think that you want to do dirty things with him?”

“Yeah,” Ann says with a grin, reaching for another handful of popcorn.

“Well, I’ve never thought that,” Leslie says with a shrug. “Sex is, well, it’s fine, I guess, but it wouldn’t bother me if I never had it again.”

“Maybe you should sleep with a woman,” Ann suggests helpfully. “Maybe you’re just gay.”

“I tried in college, sort of,” Leslie shrugs. “Not my thing either.”

“Huh,” Ann says again. “Well, this just means that we need to find you a guy who’s not a complete sleaze, right?”

“Yeah,” Leslie agrees with a grin. She leaps over the popcorn bowl, pulling Ann into a huge hug. “I’m so glad we’re friends, Ann. You’re a beautiful, accepting, powerful baby squirrel.”

“Thanks, I think,” Ann laughs into her hair.

Leslie meets Dave, and he’s sweet. He learns the names of all of the women in frames around her office, and the fact that he’d do that for her makes her stomach flip. He’s polite; he opens doors and always pays the tab. He makes her feel special. She likes how he lets her take the lead; they don’t have sex for a while, since she’s more than happy to just make out in the back of his cop car. When they finally do have sex, it’s fine. He doesn’t last as long as some of the men she’s been with, and she appreciates that.

After a few weeks of dating, she decides to tell him. In retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have told him after they’d just had sex. They’re lying next to each other in bed, Dave still a little sweaty and out of breath. Leslie loves this part, though. She loves feeling his chest move underneath her as he breathes. She loves the way his thumb taps against her hip. It’s intimate, and close, and she thinks she’s finally ready to open up to him.

It doesn’t go well.

“Was the sex that bad?” Dave asks, pulling away from her. “You know, I can—I can eat you out, or you can be on top, or—“

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Leslie tries to tell him, but Dave won’t let it go. He gets even more intense with their sex life, trying to last longer, to get her to come more times. It goes from being fine to being a hassle, and Leslie wishes she’d never said anything. He’s still a sweet guy, but when he says he’s moving to San Diego, Leslie can’t say she’s disappointed. 

She never tells Justin. She doesn’t want to become one of his stories.

Her crush on Ben Wyatt sneaks up on her. She goes from hating him, to being his coworker, to being his friend, to telling him not to leave Pawnee. He’s good at his job. He respects her. He really believes that she can accomplish what she sets out to do. He makes her laugh, and when he smiles at her, her stomach is full of butterflies.

She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but she thinks she might want to squeeze his butt. She didn’t know that butts could be cute until she met him.

They can’t date. She tries to ignore how he makes her feel. She tries to ignore how much she wants to spend time with him. It can’t happen.

It does happen.

Kissing Ben is better than she could have imagined. He curls his arms around her and she sinks into his chest. He’s slow and gentle. He doesn’t rush to shoving his tongue in her mouth. He leaves his hands on her waist, curled against her cheek, or wrapped around her back. That first night, she invites him back to her house. She doesn’t want to stop kissing him, but she knows they’ll get caught if they stay at City Hall.

When he gets to her house, she knows she should invite him upstairs. Maybe they can rush through sex, and then spend the rest of the night cuddling. 

But this night has already been so wonderful. Kissing Ben was wonderful. Realizing that he liked her—that he was willing to risk everything if it meant he could be with her—that had been one of the best moments of her life. She really doesn’t want to ruin that feeling by having sex with him. So she leads him to the couch instead, and they make out until she loses track of time. She keeps waiting for him to slip his hand under her shirt, or pull her into his lap, or do something to heat things up, but he never does. They put on a documentary for background noise, but eventually it pulls their attention away. They cuddle on her couch, order take out, and end up falling asleep fully clothed. It’s the best date she’s ever been on.

Leslie keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. She knows how men are; Ben might be willing to take it slow, but he’s not going to wait forever. Eventually, she’s going to have to sleep with him. She decides she’d rather just get it over with. She thinks she’d enjoy their make out sessions a lot more if she wasn’t always worrying about what might happen. 

And it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that Ben wants something to happen. He never escalates things, but she can see the bulge in his slacks. Sometimes he’ll excuse himself to the bathroom afterwards, and Leslie isn’t stupid.

“Right, let’s do this,” Leslie says, pulling away from a kiss one night. They’re in her bed; they’re too old to handle sleeping on the couch too many nights in a row. Nothing’s happened, but Ben’s still slept over more nights than not. 

“I thought we were doing this,” Ben says with a little grin, leaning in to kiss her again.

“Ben,” she groans, pulling away. “Stop distracting me.”

“Okay,” he says, and he pulls away too. “What are we doing?”

“Having sex,” Leslie says, starting on the top button of her shirt.

“Wait,” Ben reaches out, stilling her hand on her shirt. “Should we, uh, should we talk about this first?”

“What’s there to talk about?” Leslie asks with a frown. This will all go a lot faster if Ben stops interrupting her. 

“Well, for starters, you seem really tense,” Ben says slowly. 

“I just want to get this over with,” Leslie sighs, working on her shirt again.

“Leslie, stop,” Ben says, and his voice is sharp enough that her fingers drop from her buttons.

“What?” 

“Sex isn’t—” he tugs a hand through his hair, and Leslie’s heart sinks when she sees how upset he looks. This isn’t how this was supposed to go. “Sex isn’t something you’re supposed to do to just get it over with. You’re supposed to do it because you want to.”

“Well, it is for me,” Leslie says. She feels her cheeks heat up, and she looks away from him.

“I don’t want to have sex with you because you feel like you have to do it,” Ben says. His voice is soft, and he takes her hand. “I only want to have sex with you if you want it.”  
“What if I never want it?” Leslie asks, forcing herself to meet his eyes. When she does, she’s surprised by just how much he seems to mean what he says.

“Then we won’t have sex,” he says easily. “I really like what we’ve been doing. Don’t you?”

“I really like it too,” she admits with a smile. “I really like you, Ben.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” he grins back at her, pulling her close to his chest. “Because I really like you too.”

A few days later—when they’re not in bed, because Leslie’s learned from her mistakes—Leslie tells him the specifics. So far, Ben’s seemed on board with kissing and nothing else, but she needs to make sure they’re on the same page. She likes him, really likes him, and she doesn’t want to risk losing him. 

“The reason I don’t want to have sex is because I’m asexual,” Leslie says in a rush while his mouth is still full of take out. “That means that—”

“I know what it means,” Ben says once he’s swallowed. “I mean, you can tell me what it means to you, obviously, but I do know what it means. I’d wondered if you were.”

That isn’t what she expected. 

“You did?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he shrugs, and reaches for the box of chow mein. “I like to think I’m good at picking up signals. You never seemed to want to do more than kiss, so I wondered.” His voice is casual, like they’re not talking about anything out of the ordinary. 

“And you… And you didn’t care?” Leslie asks.

“Leslie,” Ben drops his fork, reaching out across the table to take her hand. “Of course I don’t care. I mean, I care because it’s a part of you, and I really like you, but if you’re asking if it changes the way that I feel about you, it doesn’t. I want to be with you because you’re gorgeous and driven and you make me a better person, not because I want to have sex with you.”

Leslie’s stomach is butterflies, and she can’t stop smiling. Still, she’s not ready to drop the subject yet. “But you do want to have sex, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” Ben says with a shrug. “But I have two perfectly good hands. I can take care of myself.”

“I don’t want you to resent me,” Leslie says quietly. “I’d rather have sex with you than have you end things because I can’t give you what you want.”

“You’re what I want,” Ben tells her again, his eyes intent. Leslie’s still feeling insecure, but her heart feels like it might burst.


End file.
